How do you persuade serious record buyers to invest in yet another recording of The Planets? By telling them that John Eliot Gardiner's excellent new account is probably better sounding than any currently before us? No, there has to be more - much more…like Percy Grainger. Trust me, you could buy this disc for the coupling alone and still not feel short-changed: because the first thing you will hear on pressing the start button will bowl you over. It is one of those pieces that stands on its own, a rich and fabulous folly from one of music's great originals. The conductor's great uncle, Henry Balfour Gardiner - composer, patron, promoter extraordinaire - is the hidden link here between Holst and Grainger. But who needs an excuse to bring on The Warriors?

Grainger's magnum opus, much admired by Delius among others, was the 'music for an imaginary ballet', a commission set up by Sir Thomas Beecham for Diaghilev's Ballet Russes, but one which failed to materialize. Grainger wrote it anyway of course, his imagination running riot with visions of a great tribal pageant, a 'wild sexual concert', the ghostly clans of all humankind spirited together in celebration of life's prime, 'an orgy of war-like dances, processions and merry-makings broken or accompanied, by amorous interludes'. Grainger bemoaned a world that he believed was 'dying of good taste'. The Warriors was his corrective, a symphony of dissolution. It is excessive, vulgar, as strange as it is beautiful - as witness the central love-in, a desolate serenade for hecklephone (bass oboe) - and ultimately it is inspirational. The rhythm of life strives for perpetual motion in the 'concertizing' of three grand pianos while swathes of tuned percussion pulsate their psychadelic way through the texture. Sublimation comes with an expensive moment just before the close (16'31"), where this outrageous promenade at last achieves a blazing majesty, strings outreaching themselves in an intense nobilmente, horns in opulent counterpoint. Gardiner's advantage over the only other currently available version, from Geoffrey and the Melbourne Symphony, is in the amazing clarity and immediacy of his recording. The inner workings of his outsize orchestra - not least the complex percussion interactions - are revealed to my ears for the first time. Above all, it's the rhythmic excitement of the piece that is so damnably irresitable.

Gardiner's classical and pre-classical exporations have, be necessity of style, set great store by rhythmic matters and what a boon they are in The Planets. Whilst listening I was trying to put my finger on exactly what it was about the performance that made it so fresh, so pristine. Not just the sound, for sure - but the rhythm. It's Gardiner's insistence upon precise articulations that keeps fleet-footed 'Mercury' so airborne, that brings the opening of 'Jupiter' into such sharp relief, that makes it shine all the brighter. Note the frolicsome high-woodwind counterpoints at around 1'57", or the whole passage from 4'42", the woodwinds again so alert, so characterful, the tricky brass tonguings at 4'52" (one of several such instances) so crispy negotiated. We've all heard those moments fail to achieve lift-off on account of lazy articulation. In that regard, 'Uranus' is a star turn. It is a long time since I shared the startled piccolo's moment of panic when those grisly bassoons come galumphing in. And the moment of truth, the sorcerer's final sweep of his magic wand? Both the infamous organ glissando (present without being obtrusive) and the great rasping timpani and brass pedal-points moments later, are pretty tremendous.

There are other moments where a little more theatrical rhetoric would not have gone amiss: is the controlled fury of 'Mars' perhaps a shade too controlled (the invading 5/4 rhythm doesn't quite blow your socks of on it's return)? Might the terrible climax of 'Saturn' have been measured with still greater intensity? Might he have enjoyed Jupiter's bountiful tone more? I think so. But the marmoreal beauty of 'Venus' and 'Neptune' (a ravishing texture descending from the gleam of celeste to an organ pedal sunk too deep to fathom), the sensitivity of the Philharmonia's playing, duly leave their impression. One tiny point: what a pity that the women's voices of the Monteverdi Choir - floating to perfection in the balance here - don't happen to fade from ear-shot mid-phrase. We should still be hearing them as they evaporate into the ether.